A double serving of early Shostakovich symphonism marks the latest instalment of Vasily Petrenko’s nearly half-completed Naxos cycle with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. The previous releases, including symphonies 5, 8, 9, 10, and 11, have each received glowing reviews in this column and elsewhere, and have placed Petrenko with Valery Gergiev as the leading Shostakovich interpreters of the day. The current release features the well-paired First and Third Symphonies, offering a glimpse of the young composer of the 1920s in the process of blazing new technical and formal trails. The parallels between the First and the Third Symphonies are as evident as those between the Third and the mighty Fourth, the culmination of that fascinating yet short-lived era of experimentation that was abruptly terminated by the well-known Pravda attacks. The Third Symphony, with its free-flowing lyricism and open-ended construction, stands as one of the remarkable examples of that early creative path not pursued.

The ever-versatile Morton Gould with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus took the music world by storm in 1968 with the release of the Western premiere of the Third (paired with the Second on the same LP) in a brisk (28:39) authoritative account noted for its excitement and precision playing. Not to be outdone, Kyril Kondrashin and the Moscow Philharmonic offered an even brisker (26:18), more rhythmically defined version in 1974 that to this day remains a reference. In the digital era, Neeme Järvi provides a rousing well-honed performance with his Gothenburg cohorts in a recording whose spacious headroom, for better or worse, lends a more homogeneous sound to the work’s mainly chamber-like textures. Beautifully balanced sound engineering and exquisitely shaped lines characterise Bernard Haitink’s landmark interpretation. His strong stable tempi lend the score a palatial weight not found in other editions, even if the plodding gait of the final chorus finishes on a rather uninspired note.

In his version of the Third Symphony, Petrenko continues to bring the kind of fresh insights that have distinguished his previous interpretations. He also tenders a few daring gambits, not all of which work as well as one might have expected.

The broad tempi by which he begins the symphony, drawing out at luxurious length the ruminative lines of the clarinet duet, sets the stage for a probing, mood-sensitive interpretation. Whereas most conductors abruptly shift to an allegretto tempo at the onset of the solo trumpet’s little march tune, Petrenko, as if reluctant to let go of the opening ambience, only gradually steps up the pace. As a result he sacrifices the trumpet tune’s usual perkiness for a studiously dignified tone. Though a slight departure, it leads Petrenko to a rather serious flaw in judgment later on in the movement. He otherwise carries the music forward with gripping force in the sections that follow. He captures, in the quick sectional exchanges, the twisty facets and high-spirited tension of Shostakovich’s exuberant lyricism and carries the music to vigorously punctuated crescendi. The section culminates in a succession of crescendo-building gestures that Petrenko piles on, each layer more thunderous than the last. The tightening ratchet suddenly explodes with a climactic snare drum solo that stands as the focal point of the entire section and that, in other performances, delivers a cathartic release of pent-up tension. It is here, at this brief but crucial moment that the performance errs.

Petrenko unfortunately applies a sudden ritardando at the very instant the snare drum solo appears and, as a result, he totally emasculates the moment. Repeated listenings, alas, reproduced the same deflating experience. At the same time, one can appreciate the logic behind Petrenko’s reasoning. Immediately following the snare drum solo, a variant of the trumpet’s opening march tune, a reprise in kind, is heard on the solo French Horn. The conductor no doubt felt compelled to return to the drawn out tempo with which he introduced the idea. But he does so an ill-chosen few bars too soon. While the sudden decelerando makes architectural sense, it runs counter to the emotional imperative of the music and, as such, it destroys the impact of one of the symphony’s most crucial passages.

But the performance picks itself up and resumes its vigour. Petrenko charts a course both eloquent and evocative through the strangely shifting moods of the work’s latter half. The various passages for strings, now seductively tender, now shadowy and mysterious, achieve a particular poignancy in this nuanced performance. These episodes lead to a crescendo that is nothing less than glorious, and following that, perhaps the finest rendition of the choral finale on record. In this finale Petrenko elicits a vibrantly textured reading, achieved in part through the passionate involvement of his choristers, and in part though inspired tempo shifts in places where other interpreters have simply marked time with a uniform pulse. Halfway through this four-minute finale, the female choir injects a fresh surge of energy at the image of the Revolution setting sail: “Noviye korpusa – novaya polosa Maya” (“Those new hulls were a new stage of May”), taking the symphony to an unprecedented level of jubilation.

Petrenko brings the same vitality to his rendition of the First Symphony. His tendency to play up extremes, in tempi, tension and dynamics, is something of a Petrenko trademark, and here it works to brilliant effect. The crescendi in the opening movement erupt in stupendous upheavals, all the more so as they are then offset by the unblinking serenity of the surrounding waltz sections. The edgy tension of the quick sectional relays is further enhanced by the sharp attacks and punchy phrasing Petrenko elicits from his soloists. The same polar opposites make for a dazzling Scherzo. David Fanning, in his Gramophone review (June 2011), finds the slowed down tempo of the trio section, as taken, damaging to the symphonic flow, leaving the entire performance, for him, irreparably marred as a result. I rather find the play of extremes consistent with, indeed a highly effective example of, Petrenko’s approach to Shostakovich’s music as described above. The slower portions are sumptuously drawn out, at times taken down to the level of a whisper, providing a foil for the fast portions, which scramble and fly with exhilarating pinpoint precision. The solos for oboe, cello and violin in the slow movement are beautifully realised, with vibrato enough to personalise without over-indulging, each one flowing from a commonly shared fountain of inspiration. Lines soar and encircle the tum-ta-ta-tum motif in a mighty maelstrom. The snare drum crescendo that rings in the final movement simmers to perfection and leads to a succession of lyrical passages alternating with tempestuous flourishes. Petrenko delineates these contrasting sections with broad expansive gestures favourably reminiscent of Leopold Stokowski’s extravagant baton style.

If to my mind there is one shortcoming in this performance, it is one of missed opportunity. Petrenko builds the final crescendo with such sweeping all-or-nothing grandeur that he has fairly well earned the property rights to those magnificent silences that surround the climactic solo timpani strokes that follow. The last two of the score’s three fermatas are over the trills and Neeme Järvi and Karel Ancerl prominently play up the teasing wait-for-it pauses. But, though Petrenko’s powerful ascent surely justifies milking the moment for all it’s worth, his pauses are barely stretched at all. While dramatic enough, they are not as deeply moving as they could have, nay, should have been. The timpani strokes are, none the less, delivered with sufficient force to make the point. No harm done. Only a minor omission in what is elsewhere and otherwise a superb rendition.

Technical details are all top-notch. Given the chamber-like textures that dominate each of these symphonies, the microphones are ideally situated, apparently somewhere around the conductor’s podium, providing the listener with superb sonic transparency in the ensemble work and intimate spotlighting in the solos. Liner notes by Richard Whitehouse are richly detailed and provide ample context and the sung text is included.

Classic productions, in particular of operas are, well, classic. But they bring with them the problem of legacy: when an opera house gets a ‘winner’, they – and their audience – can be loth to lose it. I’ve been to more than one “last ever revival” that returned “by public demand”. And that’s not even to start to address the artistic issue of how these productions sit, toad-like, excluding others. And while a classic Carmen won’t be the only show in town, rarer works can become inextricably linked to a single vision.

And yet, and yet… There are some that are simply so crucial that losing them is almost inconceivable. One of these must surely be the Moscow Chamber Theatre’s 1974 revival of The Nose: a production with which Shostakovich was closely involved and which he endorsed. The MCO theatre itself is tiny (as the DVD reveals) – just over 200 seats. But the company has toured the production extensively, developing a number of alterations to suit larger venues.

In 1975 Rozhdestvensky made his audio recording (though others had already laid down the suite) and, through an EMI LP, that became how it was best known in the West. More Russians saw it when, in 1979, Yuri Bogatirenko filmed it for TV. Then a 1991 performance under Vladimir Agronsky was filmed and released on a Japanese laser disc (EMI TOWL 3747-8) in 1995, though it is yet to resurface on DVD. Belyankin’s film The Composer Shostakovich(1975) includes footage of rehearsals and a performance with Shostakovich in attendance, footage which appears in various documentaries and on YouTube.

Though separated by four years, Bogatirenko and Rozhdestvensky have identical major cast members, indeed many of the singers continued in their roles for many years. The timings of some of the scenes are uncannily similar, an astonishing feat of consistency, so anyone who knows the CD will have a good idea of how the DVD goes. Of course that doesn’t make the DVD redundant! Though the vocal acting is superb, the visuals reinforce it. When Ivan Yakovlevich decides to miss out on his regular morning coffee we understand all the pros and cons that are going through his head and which Gogol carefully explains, even before he sings a few of them.

The film opens with shots of Shostakovich at the rehearsal and the actors preparing for the performance. Then a brief shot from the back of the theatre brings us into the auditorium before we close in on the stage action. The first two acts run continuously, which is sensible given that the action is continuous. It is almost as if Shostakovich’s division of the two acts is a jokey artificiality. Act 3, like the first half of the show, starts with Shostakovich looking on.

The backdrop is a silhouetted queue of Petersburgers who watch and judge Kovalev and the others (it was reproduced in the booklet of the EMI LP). Watching and judging are recurrent themes in the opera: throughout the three-line Prologue, Kovalev gazes into a mirror autoscopophiliacally (perhaps even in a sense that Freud would have understood: after all, the doctor does ask Kovalev if anything else is missing). When Ivan Yakovlevich finds the nose in the roll, he and his wife barely look at each other as their eyes are locked on the offending item and later, the police officer obsesses about his eyesight. Spectacles seem not to help anyone: the policeman and the old woman both wear sunglasses, paradoxically helping them see but making them look blind, and take them off at crucial moments. During the percussion interlude he removes them, the better to see, and struts and air-punches his way around the stage before staring intimidatingly into the audience; when the nose is beaten back into its original form the old woman takes hers off to look at it. Perhaps most interestingly, the newspaper clerk wears a frock coat in keeping with the period production, but his thick-rimmed spectacles and open-necked shirt give him a more modern look.

It would be easy to pack the MCO stage with the opera’s seventy-odd characters, but much of the time, it is quite sparsely populated. As Ivan tries to ‘lose’ the nose he scurries around the stage, hiding under his mean blanket while, audience-like, people line the wings and comment on his efforts. The stage space is extended by actors staring pointedly into the audience and by bringing through them the screen behind which Yakovlev will make his grotesquely toiletting noises. One of the few full stages comes with the climactic scene, complete with New Babylonian parasolomania.

The nose itself (has any opera’s titular character spent less time on stage?) makes its stately entrance into Kazan Cathedral while a bandaged Kovalev looks on. Some productions go for the full nasal, but here the actor, wearing his State Councillor’s uniform high-collared to hide his cheeks and brushing his hair forward to hide the top of his face, has something more Cyrano-ish poking out. Again, showing how this is not a production preserved in aspic, some incarnations have a far more prominent proboscis. Meanwhile, Kovalev’s noselessness is signified by a blob of black make-up (the wonderfully uncanny ocarina-like sound that accompanies his efforts to stick it back on is even more pronounced here than on Rozhdestvensky’s recording).

The film’s value is precisely in its refusal to “rethink” the production: it is a straightforward record, and there are very few ‘cinematic’ moments: Bogatirenko doesn’t fight shy of showing the sideline actors handing props into the stage, almost as Formalist revelations of process. However, the framing of the letter scene hides some things happening in the background and remove some of the alternating ‘freeze-frames’ à la The Government Inspector (there’s another very clear one at the very end). One moment does jar: a very cinematic zoom backwards to a deep focus shot with the doctor in the foreground and Kovalev in the distance. There are further reminders that this is a performance, with occasional shots of the score on Rozhdestvensky’s stand.

The presentation of the DVD is very good, though the documentation is minimal: a single page listing the cast and chaptering – and it claims that the opera is 134 minutes long, rather than the actual 95. Each scene and interlude is a separate chapter so navigation is easy, though there aren’t any thumbnails. There are English, French, Italian, Russian and Spanish subtitles in yellow or the option to watch with none. The English subtitles are in an idiomatic American: things are “gotten” and Kovalev is urged to “write her”.

Ironically, the film’s vintage has worked to its visual advantage. It was shot on film and so looks very nice and the transfer to DVD has been well done. There isn’t any combing in fast moving passages and the colours are strong. The tonal range is quite good, so that shadow details are retained.

There are a couple of extras. In a four and a half minute interview, Pokrovsky talks about the work’s centrality both to the MCO (though it was its seventh production) and to modern opera productions, comparing it in importance toThe Seagull at the Moscow Arts Theatre. There is also a clip of a couple of minutes of the footage of Shostakovich at the rehearsals. It’s fascinating to hear him discuss the work, the production and the performance with Rozhdestvensky and Pokrovsky, and to see every nuance of the music streak through his body, so it’s a shame that not all of that footage could not have been included.

So, even those who already own Rozhdestvensky’s recording should consider adding this to their collections.

There could hardly be a greater contrast with the Mariinsky’s 2004 Nose, directed by Yuri Alexandrov and conducted by Gergiev. Where the MCO theatre is a tiny and has virtually no machinery, the Mariinsky has a huge stage to fill and advanced technology to achieve it. Hence it was dominated by a massive mobile construction, while projected film clips and other effects threaten to overwhelm the music.

In 2008, after performances both at the Mariinsky and on tour, Gergiev recorded only the third complete traversal of the opera after Rozhdestvensky and a 2001 version from Armin Jordan (Cascavelle RSR 6183), which flew in an out of the catalogue almost before anyone knew.

Gergiev has something of a reputation for inconsistency, equally able to produce performances and recordings so wild that they just about cling on, as well as ones so controlled as to sound like an exploded diagram of the score.The Nose sits somewhere between the two. There’s an almost Webernian clarity, each change of colour meticulously logged. The booklet’s orchestral list implies that, rather than the score’s various doublings, Gergiev elected to assign each part its own player and perhaps that helps the almost superhuman accuracy. And the fact that it was recorded over eight days must have helped, especially with the near-criminal trumpet part.

Occasionally it risks losing spontaneity. When Kovalev wakes up in scene 3, Vladislav Sulminsky sounds more concerned to follow what is, admittedly, a bizarre piece of vocal writing, rather than let himself go. According to Rozhdestvensky, one of Shostakovich’s few technical mis-steps was to forget how a balalaika is tuned, making the accompaniment to the valet Ivan’s aria unperformable[1]. In the MCO production the instrument was tuned in fifths and “played by a violinist on stage wearing a red shirt”. In the film no player is visible though it is clear that Boris Druzhinin is miming the instrument while he sings. However Gergiev’s player achieves it, he is completely unfazed by the difficulties.

Predictably, the choral contribution in Kazan Cathedral is superb: full voiced, even-toned and passionate. If anything this set gets better as it progresses. The battering of the nose is truly terrifying and the thoughts of the old lady (Elena Vitman) about the nearness of death and how she wants to be buried are nobly touching and completely unironic. Somehow she manages to bring out the melodic pre-echoes of the Fourteenth Symphony’s Lorelei before she’s rudely cut off by the bublik seller. Gergiev also trims the spoken interpolation towards the end, which seems to wax and wane at producers’ whims but, for me at least, can go on too long. Here there’s just about enough, crucially including Gogol’s observation that the most incredible thing is that an author should choose to write about such a subject.

As with all the Mariinsky’s CDs, the accompanying booklet is superbly produced, though Anglo- and Russophones benefit the most, with the complete libretto in both languages. French and German is added for the artists’ biographies and the synopsis (which suggests that the barber-shop Prologue may be Ivan Yakovlevich’s dream – perhaps derived from the Formalists’ observation that Нос (nose) is Cон (dream) backwards. Also quadrilingual is Leonid Gakkel’s slightly discursive article Keeping Intrinsic Value. And there’s a guide to Cyrillic pronunciation to help people through the libretto (there’s no transliteration).

The Nose is one of Shostakovich’s most finely etched scores: not a line is out of place, and Rozhdestvensky and Gergiev have struck different, and complementary, prints from this brilliant plate. The former, perhaps not the cleanest, brings the greater spirit but Gergiev allows us to see every detail.

[1] In Shostakovich: a Life Remembered Rozhdestvensky describes how he found a copyist’s score, annotated by the composer for the first performances, but there is no explanation as to why it didn’t address this problem or what might have happened in the first run.